Chapter Seventy: The Trap of the Blood Clan (Part One)

Watching the taxi speed away, pursued by a police car, I could only shake my head in resignation. I decided not to dwell on who that strange man really was. I simply chalked him up as a lunatic—after all, even a Lei Feng in a red scarf wouldn’t kick me out of a moving car. He was just a madman with brute strength.

Brushing the dust from my clothes, I was about to head back to campus when I glanced around and realized, damn, the school was several miles away. The very thought left me feeling utterly miserable.

For safety’s sake, I dared not take another taxi—after what just happened, I was on the verge of developing a taxi phobia. But a few miles wasn’t really that far; it would only take twenty minutes or so on foot. I decided to treat it as a stroll.

It was already past three in the afternoon, and by the time I reached the academy, it was after four. For the first generation of the Demon Corpse King, a walk like this was nothing. If I weren’t worried about startling passersby, I wouldn’t have hesitated to use a faster means—namely, the wings concealed at my back. With those, the journey would have taken mere minutes.

Upon arriving at the academy, I saw pairs of underclassmen and underclasswomen from freshmen to juniors holding hands and strolling along the campus paths. As a senior, I couldn’t help but feel that college was just a matchmaking ground—everyone younger than me seemed to have found a partner, while I was still single, which gave me a headache just thinking about it.

With over ten thousand students from across the country, the campus was vast. It took me more than ten minutes and several turns to finally reach my dorm. College life was inherently free—attend class if you wished, or skip if you didn’t.

These days, my dorm mates seemed to have finally realized the importance of credits. No more surfing the web or flirting with girls; instead, they clung to their textbooks, shuttling between classrooms all day long. Even in their sleep, they mumbled English vocabulary. Time had flown by, and now it was just over a month until graduation. Five days ago, we had made arrangements with the vampires to go and defeat the Wolf King’s subordinate. The closer graduation drew, the more tangled everything became.

As for the graduation exams, I was absolutely confident. The memory of a demon corpse was unlike that of ordinary people—I only needed to casually flip through a book to fully grasp its contents. Now, I was ranked first among all seniors, baffling many professors, who couldn’t make sense of a student who was absent as often as I was, yet achieved so much.

Time slipped by unnoticed, and soon it was after eleven at night. While everyone else was sound asleep, I leaped from the third-floor window, unaware that Zhang Qiang had witnessed everything through hazy eyes.

From Zhang Qiang’s perspective, all he saw was a dark figure jumping out the window, which startled him so much that he slapped Gao Wei, asleep beside him, and exclaimed, “Wake up! Someone just jumped out of our dorm!”

Hearing this, Gao Wei jolted awake, sprang from his bed in a single leap, and rushed to the window to look down.

Speaking of Gao Wei, he was a bona fide country lad—muscular, brilliant, but with one fatal flaw: he couldn’t stand being fooled. By the moonlight, he peered down to see nothing but bare, muddy ground. He smacked Zhang Qiang on the head and said, “You know my temper, right? If we weren’t long-time friends, I’d beat you senseless. Go see for yourself, you little punk. Must’ve had too much cola yesterday and started hallucinating!” With that, he flopped back onto his lower bunk and was soon snoring again.

Zhang Qiang rubbed the side of his head where Gao Wei had hit him, walked over to the window, and looked down, seeing nothing. He shook his head and muttered, “Maybe I really did drink too much cola yesterday and started seeing things. Never mind, back to sleep.” With that, he lay down and, within minutes, was dreaming again, drooling on his pillow, lost in who knows what fantasy.

I unfurled my wings and soared above the city of Z, basking in the neon glow of the night. Z City was a spectacle of lights and revelry, rivalling even the international metropolis of S City in scale and grandeur.

Not long after, I landed atop the roof of the Weixi Si Grand Hotel, where five Westerners with chestnut hair awaited. The leader exuded a very different aura from the previous Macas I had encountered—sharper, more intense, far beyond any ordinary comparison.

As I approached, the head vampire clapped his hands, and several vampire viscounts escorted two men before me.

Those two were none other than Te and his father. Now, looking at his father, I saw he seemed even more haggard and aged than before.

Macas approached with a faint smile and said, “See? I’m letting them go right now. Let’s be off.”

I ignored Macas and instead walked over to Te, saying, “It’s all right now. Take your father to Uncle Mao’s place. I’ll come find you once I’m done here.” Then I turned my head and said to Macas, “Let’s go.”

Macas didn’t seem offended by my indifference. On the contrary, he laughed heartily, then he and four vampires behind him—each bearing a familial resemblance—unfurled their blood-red bat wings and soared from the rooftop. Hovering in the air, he called out, “Xiaodong, let’s go!” With that, he beat his wings and vanished into the depths of the night.

I glanced at Te and his father, left them with a word of caution, and then beat my own wings, inscribed with golden runes, and gave chase. Not far behind, Te’s father, Carter, twitched at the corner of his mouth and murmured something no one heard: “You mustn’t go—it’s a trap. Sealed in the East are Wolf King Ao Yue and his first war general, Silver Moon, and they broke free from their seals fifty years ago. Most importantly, Macas has already surpassed the Blood Emperor…” With that, he let Te help him downstairs, his movements stiff and feeble, as though he could barely summon the strength to move.

In the blink of an eye, we had left Z City, soared over several small counties and villages, until a gloomy forest spread before us. To be honest, I hadn’t seen a single household in a long while.

The endless dark forest, drenched in the silver glow of a crescent moon, looked especially eerie.

Z City was in the north; though wolves had become rare due to relentless hunting, there were still some in the larger forests, like this vast stretch where the howls of wild wolves echoed through the night.

We’d been flying for over an hour, covering hundreds of miles, well beyond the jurisdiction of Z City.

After a while, we finally landed in an open clearing. Here, an ancient, strange building stood alone, surrounded by pits and craters dug by human hands.

Six imposing figures hovered in the air, but only my own wings shimmered with golden runes, a stark contrast between the Demon Corpse clan and these so-called aristocratic vampires.

Suspended at the front, Macas pointed below and, in halting Chinese, said, “We’re here. This is the place.” The five bloodline kin behind him dispersed, leaving only Macas and me hovering a hundred meters above the dig site.

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(Will the Wolf King Ao Yue appear? And who exactly is Ao Yue? To find out what happens next, look out for the next installment. If you’d like to make a guess, please head over to the review section and share your thoughts. Thank you all for supporting Destiny’s Child, and for supporting Gu Yue Xiaodong ^_^)